The 3 time-bomb issues candidates ignore

The 2016 presidential campaign has morphed into an enthralling reality show with colorful and entertaining candidates that defy the imagination of a Hollywood scriptwriter. Acknowledging the campaign's inherent entertainment value, Showtime, the premium cable channel, has ordered a new "real-time" weekly documentary series aptly named, "The Circus: Inside the Greatest Political Show on Earth" – scheduled…

U.S. Church Puts Five Israeli Banks on Investment Blacklist

 Republished from haaretz.com
 The pension fund of the United Methodist Church, the largest Protestant group in the U.S., makes the move in an effort to exclude companies that profit from abuse of human rights; Officials: Israel will try change the decision.
The Associated Press and Barak Ravid Jan 13, 2016 12:03 PM




A tourist photographs a sign painted on a wall in the West Bank biblical town of Bethlehem, June 5, 2015. AFP/Thomas Coex

    Protestant churches split over anti-Israel divestment resolutions
    United Church of Christ votes to divest from companies with ties to Israeli settlements
    United Methodist Church's pension board divests from Israel-linked company
read more: http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.697148

The pension fund for the United Methodist Church has blocked five Israeli banks from its investment portfolio in what it describes as a broad review meant to weed out companies that profit from abuse of human rights.

Senior officials in Israel's Foreign Ministry said they are still examining the decision, but added that Israel will make quiet efforts to convince the leaders of the church to change or soften the measure ahead of the Methodist General Conference in May.

The fund, called the General Board of Pension and Health Benefits, excluded Bank Hapoalim, Bank Leumi, First International Bank of Israel, Israel Discount Bank, and Mizrahi Tefahot Bank, according to the pension board's website.

The Israeli bank stock the board sold off was worth a few million dollars in a fund with $20 billion in assets. The fund also sold holdings worth about $5,000 in the Israeli real estate and construction company Shikun & Binui, and barred the company from the pension group's investment portfolio.

The pension board identified Israel and the Palestinian territories among more than a dozen "high risk" countries or regions with "a prolonged and systematic pattern of human rights abuses." Other countries on the list include Saudi Arabia, the Central African Republic and North Korea.

The Methodist church has about 13 million members worldwide and is the largest mainline Protestant group in the United States.

The pension board had initiated the review in 2014 with a focus on protecting human rights and easing climate change. A total of 39 companies around the world were excluded from the fund's investments over human rights concerns and nine more were blocked over worries about their alleged contribution to global warming. The fund remains invested in 18 Israeli companies, according to board spokeswoman Colette Nies.

The banks had been among several companies targeted by United Methodist Kairos Response, a coalition of church members who advocate for divestment from companies with business in the Israeli occupied territories.

"This is the first step toward an effort that helps send a clear message that we as a church are listening and that we are concerned about human rights violations," Susanne Hoder, a leader of United Methodist Kairos Response, said Tuesday. "We hope it will also be encouraging to people in the Jewish community who are working for justice."

A competing group, United Methodists for Constructive Peacemaking in Israel and Palestine, said in a statement that the pension board action should not be viewed as divestment from Israel, since the top Methodist legislative body rejected proposals in 2012 to divest from companies that produce equipment used by Israel in the territories. The same body, called General Conference, passed a resolution denouncing the Israeli occupation and expanding Jewish settlements in the territories.

The pension board's decision came at a time when divestment is gaining momentum among liberal Protestants as a tool to pressure Israel over its policies toward Palestinians. Last year, the United Church of Christ voted to divest from companies with business in the Israeli-occupied territories. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) took a similar vote in 2014.

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The Associated Press
read more: http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.697148

Canadians Panic As Food Prices Soar On Collapsing Currency

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/13/2016 23:18 -0500

inShare73

It was just yesterday when we documented the continuing slide in the loonie, which is suffering mightily in the face of oil’s inexorable decline.

As regular readers are no doubt acutely aware, Canada is struggling through a dramatic economic adjustment, especially in Alberta, the heart of the country’s oil patch. Amid the ongoing crude carnage the province has seen soaring property crime, rising food bank usage and, sadly, elevated suicide rates, as Albertans struggle to comprehend how things up north could have gone south (so to speak) so quickly.

The plunging loonie “can only serve to worsen the death of the 'Canadian Dream'" we said on Tuesday.


As it turns out, we were right.

The currency's decline is having a pronounced effect on Canadians' grocery bills.
 As Bloomberg reminds us, Canada imports around 80% of its fresh fruits and vegetables. When the loonie slides, prices for those goods soar. "With lower-income households tending to spend a larger portion of income on food, this side effect of a soft currency brings them the most acute stress" Bloomberg continues.

Of course with the layoffs piling up, you can expect more households to fall into the "lower-income" category where they will have to fight to afford things like $3 cucumbers, $8 cauliflower, and $15 Frosted Flakes. 

As Bloomberg notes, James Price, director of Capital Markets Products at Richardson GMP, recently joked during an interview on BloombergTV Canada that "we're going to be paying a buck a banana pretty soon."

Have a look at the following tweets which underscore just how bad it is in Canada's grocery aisles. And no, its not just Nunavut: it from coast to coast:

And while some Canadians might think this is a regional phenomenon ...

... folks in the northern parts of the Great White North do have the most cause to cry foul:




No "Jack Nasty" it's not The Great Depression, but as we highlighted three weeks ago, it is Canada's depression and it's likely to get worse before it gets better. "Last year, fruits and veggies jumped in price between 9.1 and 10.1 per cent, according to an annual report by the Food Institute at the University of Guelph," CBC said on Tuesday. "The study predicts these foods will continue to increase above inflation this year, by up to 4.5 per cent for some items."

If you thought we were being hyperbolic when we suggested that if oil prices don't rise soon, Canadians may well eat themselves to death, consider the following from Diana Bronson, the executive director of Food Secure Canada: 

"Lower- and middle-class people — many who can't find a job that will pay them enough to ensure that they can afford a healthy diet for their families" — also feel the pinch of rising food prices"

"The wrong kind of food is cheap, and the right kind of food is still expensive."

In other words, some now fear that the hardest hit parts of the country may experience a spike in obesity rates as Canadians resort to cheap, unhealthy foods. As we put it, "in Alberta it's 'feast or famine' in the most literal sense of the phrase as those who can still afford to buy food will drown their sorrows in cheap lunch meat and off-brand ice cream while the most hard hit members of society are forced to tap increasingly overwhelmed food banks." 

And the rub is that there's really nothing anyone can do about it.
Were the Bank of Canada to adopt pro-cyclical measures to shore up the loonie, they would risk choking off economic growth just as the crude downturn takes a giant bite out of the economy - no food pun intended.

Eye to Eye Part 2 - Bill Koenig and Gary Stearman

The Biblical Truth About Total Depravity - Tom Stegal

Reblogged from bibleprophecyblog.com

Tom Stegall presents a biblical perspective on the topic of Total Depravity. This message disputes the Calvinistic position of Total Depravity which is commonly referred to as the "T" in "TULIP" (an acronym that encapsulates Calvinism theology).

Sinai´s Slippery senses

Sinai’s Slippery Senses
In Defense of the Faith
Tuesday, January 12, 2016
Wendy Wippel

One of the weirdest statements the Bible makes occurs in Exodus 20 at a momentous occasion in the history of the Jewish nation, God’s giving of the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai. “And the entire nation saw the voices and the thunder”. Saw voices?  And thunder?  What gives?
Well, at least it certainly got their attention.

Now a Jewish holiday called Shavuot, the day commemorates the giving of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, the seminal moment in Jewish history and the birth of the nation.  Jewish tradition records that “all of the Ten Commandments were revealed simultaneously, in a manner which a person can not possibly articulate. A language, that which a mouth could not say, nor could ears hear." according to the Midrash.

At the very least we can surmise that something very unusual-- something out of normal human experience--, was going on.
Which is interesting for two reasons.

First, from a human standpoint, the statement that the people “saw the voices” seems completely preposterous
We don’t see voices.
At least, not til Isaac Newton, we didn’t.

Newton was one of the first scientists to gather evidence that sometimes, in fact, the neural pathways of the brain get confused.  And when that happens, regions of the brain that are normally committed to solely one function like hearing, or sight, can begin abnormally active cross-talk between regions that don’t normally interact, and the senses get confused.  People smell sounds. They see numbers as colors.

 It’s a disorder now known as synesthesia (meaning “perceive together”)’
And in Sinai several thousand years ago, the revelation of God’s eternal word apparently created such stimulation of human neurons that the people were able to “see” voices and “visualize”  thunder. Not at all preposterous at this point, but a recognized—albeit  very unusual--  neural disorder.
It’s also very interesting from a very supernatural standpoint.

Yakov Gugeinheim, an Israeli physicist and electronic systems specialist also found the description of the  Israelite’s reaction to the giving of  the ten commandments interesting.  And he developed a sophisticated software program that turned sound wave patterns into visual images.
Then he spoke the letters of the Hebrew alphabet into the program.

Intriguingly, for 18 of the 22 Hebrew letters spoken into the system, the sound wave pattern reproduced the shape of the letter itself, supporting the traditional Jewish belief that the alphabet itself has supernatural origin.

Which is also interesting given the hints we have in Scripture that communication from God—both written and spoken—has a distinct power:

"For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater: So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it."  (Isaiah 55:10-11)

And that’s because God’s word is in explicably but nonetheless inextricably linked to the person of God himself in the form of his son, Jesus, born to redeem mankind from the foundations of the world:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. (John 1:1-3)

Jesus said that not a yod or a tittle would ever pass away before God’s word is proven to be the supernatural word of Go.
The rabbis apparently are fond of saying that when Messiah comes, he will not only explain the word, but he will explain the spaces between the letter.
I can’t wait.
About Wendy Wippel
Last week: Patterns and Prophecies

Caroline Glick - - Beit Orot Annual Dinner

Beit Orot key speech, Jan. 9, 2016

In response to the requests you've sent me, here is my speech from last week's Beit Orot dinner in New York as a Facebook video, for easy sharing.

Posted by Caroline Glick on Tuesday, January 12, 2016

‘Pope Francis’ Calls for Collaboration With World’s Religions, Those Who ‘Meet God in Different Ways’

Republished from christiannews.net

By Heather Clark on January 9, 2016

 

ROME — In his first-ever video declaring his “prayer intentions,” the Roman Catholic leader Jorge Bergoglio, also known as Pope Francis, called for dialogue and collaboration among those of the various world religions on Tuesday, asserting that they are simply “seeking or meeting God in different ways.”

“Most of the planet’s inhabitants declare themselves believers,” he states in the production released on the Feast of Epiphany. “This should lead to dialogue among religions. We should not stop praying for it and collaborating with those who think differently.”

The video then features clips of those from different world religions declaring belief in their various deities.
“I have confidence in Buddha,” a female lama announces.

“I believe in God,” a rabbi affirms.
“I believe in Jesus Christ,” a priest states.
“I believe in Allah,” an Islamic leader declares.

Francis contends that all the religions of the world simply represent mankind’s diversity in seeking God. He says that despite the differing beliefs, everyone is a child of the same God.

“Many think differently, feel differently, seeking God or meeting God in different ways,” he states. “In this crowd, in this range of religions, there is only one certainty that we have for all: we are all children of God.”

The video then provides footage of the pontiff meeting with and embracing those of various religions, including Buddhists, Islamists and Orthodox Jews. It again cuts to representatives of the world’s religions, who now declare the same statement: “I believe in love.”

“I hope you will spread my prayer request this month: that sincere dialogue among men and women of different faiths may produce fruits of peace and justice,” Francis states. “I have confidence in your prayers.”

Gendron

But not everyone is supportive of the Vatican’s call for unity and common ground. Mike Gendron of Proclaiming the Gospel Ministries of Plano, Texas told Christian News Network that the pontiff’s assertions that all mankind is “seeking or meeting God in different ways,” and that all are children of the same God, are flawed.

“Tragically, those who do not know the Bible or who refuse to submit to it as the supreme authority for truth, will be deceived by the pope’s latest pronouncement,” he stated. “The pope’s assertion that all mankind meets with/seeks after the same God, just in different ways, is false according to the word of God. No one seeks for (the true) God (Rom. 3:11), but there are many who seek after false gods of their own imagination or false gods of their religious traditions. The only way to meet with the true God is His way, through the one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus (1 Tim. 2:5).”

“The word of God reveals that the human race is made up of people who are either children of God or children of the devil (1 John 3:10),” Gendron explained. “The Lord Jesus soundly rebuked the religious leaders of His day for refusing to believe the truth of His Word (John 8:440-43). Jesus told them that their father was the devil, who is the father of lies (John 8:44).”

“This remains true today,” he continued. “The god of this world has created a variety of religions to blind all of his children from the light of the Gospel and the glory of Christ (2 Cor. 4:4).”
Gedron said that in one sense—although not deliberately—Francis is correct as all are children of the darkness by nature, but man only becomes a child of God when he is reborn in Christ.

“Everyone is a child of the ‘god of this world’ until they exchange their religion for a relationship with the one true God through Jesus Christ,” he outlined. “Those who receive Jesus by believing in His name become children of God (John 1:12-13).”

Gendron, a former Roman Catholic, also opined that the pontiff’s ecumenicism is fulfilling prophesy about the formulation of a one world religion.
“As the pope continues to accelerate his ecumenical agenda to rebuild the religious tower of Babel, he will be fulfilling Bible prophecy. All the religions of the world already share a ‘works-righteousness’ salvation and they all are already united by a common spiritual bond,” he said.
“As we see the prophetic one-world religion forming, we know the children of the true God will have no part of it because they have been sanctified by the truth and sealed with the Holy Spirit (2 Thes. 2:13),” Gendron stated.

J.D. Farag Mid-East prophecy update

Column one: Obama’s constitutional overreach… and Israel

Reblogged from jpost.com

To advance its diplomatic opening to Iran, the administration spied on both law-abiding US citizens and on US lawmakers.

 

US President Barack Obama listens to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office. (photo credit:JPOST STAFF,REUTERS) 

It is far from clear why senior Obama administration officials told The Wall Street Journal that under President Barack Obama, the National Security Agency has been aggressively spying not only on Israeli officials but on US citizens and lawmakers who communicate with Israeli officials. Perhaps they were trying to make Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu look like a fool.

After all, the article concludes that the NSA intercepts of these communications “revealed one surprise."

“Mr. Netanyahu and some of his allies voiced confidence they could win enough votes” in Congress to scuttle Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.

Ha ha. What dummies.

If their goal was simply to show that the White House has more leverage over Democratic lawmakers than the Israeli government does, then the article overshot the mark.

Beyond expressing the administration’s contempt for Netanyahu, the Journal’s article showed that Netanyahu isn’t the only one the administration sneers at.

It sneers at the American public and at members of Congress as well. And in so doing, it sneers at and deliberately breaks US law and tramples the US Constitution.

Under US law, American intelligence gathering agencies, including the NSA, are only permitted to spy on US citizens in order to protect US national security.

Under the US Constitution, the administration is arguably prohibited from spying on US lawmakers.

And yet, according to the Journal report, to advance its diplomatic opening to Iran, the administration has knowingly and deliberately spied on both law-abiding US citizens who posed no risk to US national security and on US lawmakers engaged in their lawful, constitutional duties.

As the criminal activity was characterized by the report, to protect Obama’s nuclear talks with the Iranians, Netanyahu was marked as a top intelligence target for the NSA. The NSA monitored all of his communications and all communications of his senior officials – most notably Ambassador Ron Dermer.

The report explains that the NSA’s “targeting of Israeli leaders and officials also swept up the contents of some of their private conversations with US lawmakers and American-Jewish groups. That raised fears – an “Oh sh** moment, one senior US official said – that the executive branch would be accused of spying on Congress.”

That “Oh sh** moment” didn’t make the administration pull back, or order the NSA to follow the law and destroy all communications between Israeli officials and US lawmakers. Rather the administration decided to suffice with winks and nods to make sure that the NSA understood that it should make law breaking an official policy and continue to share deliberately the communications it had mistakenly shared with the White House.

As the Journal report put it, “White House officials believed the intercepted information could be valuable to counter Mr. Netanyahu’s campaign [to convince Congress to scuttle Obama’s nuclear capitulation to Tehran]. They also recognized that asking for it was politically risky. So, wary of a paper trail stemming from a request, the White House let the NSA decide what to share and what to withhold, officials said. “We didn’t say, ‘Do it,’ a senior US official said. ‘We didn’t say, “Don’t do it.”’” Cute. But probably illegal.

The picture painted by the Journal article is of an administration that made massive, continuous and deliberate use of intercepted conversations between lawmakers and private citizens with Israeli officials.

Consider the administration’s indignant fury when news broke on January 21 of last year that the Republican congressional leaders Sen. Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehnor had invited Netanyahu to address the joint Houses about the dangers of the Iran nuclear deal.

Obama and his advisers insisted that they were blindsided by the news. Yet, on Wednesday, the Journal published a report that strongly indicated that through its spying on lawmakers, the White House learned of the plan to invite Netanyahu to speak before Congress before Netanyahu found out about it.

The Journal reported that Boehner and McConnell met on January 8 and decided to invite Netanyahu to address a joint session. Recognizing the sensitivity of the issue, they told only their closest advisers about their plan. On January 9, Boehner called Dermer and raised the issue for the first time.

Since we now know that the NSA was monitoring all of Dermer’s communications – including his communications with US lawmakers – it appears to follow that NSA intercepted Boehner’s call to Dermer.

According to the Journal, the White House’s demand for intelligence on Israel was so intense that the NSA was transferring transcripts of intercepted calls within six hours of their interception.

Two weeks after Netanyahu’s March 4 address before the joint Houses of Congress, the Journal reported that the US was concerned about Israeli spying on the nuclear talks with Iran.

The article began, “Soon after the US and other major powers entered negotiations last year... [with Iran], senior White House officials learned Israel was spying on the closed-door talks.”

It continued, “The espionage didn’t upset the White House as much as Israel’s sharing of inside information with US lawmakers and others.”

The article went on to describe the content of briefings Dermer gave US lawmakers in late 2013 detailing Israel’s concerns about the interim nuclear deal the US was then concluding with the Iranians. Although it was attributed to congressional sources who participated in the briefings, now that we know the administration was spying on US lawmakers communicating with Israeli officials, it is reasonable to suspect that the administration learned of the briefings from its illegal espionage against US lawmakers.

In Wednesday’s article, we learned that last summer, as Congress prepared to vote – or not to vote – on Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, the administration intercepted communications carried out between Israeli officials and private citizens as well as Democratic lawmakers.

From these intercepted communications, the administration learned Israel’s pitch for Democratic lawmakers in its efforts to convince them to oppose the deal.

According to the article, among other things, Israeli officials asked the wavering lawmakers, “How can we get your vote? What is it going to take?” Given Israel’s failure to convince a significant number of Democratic senators to oppose the deal, the suspicion arises that the administration read the answers and used the ill-begotten information as a means of blocking Israel from securing Democratic opposition to Obama’s nuclear deal.

It ought to go without saying that the administration’s massive efforts to block information about the most radical US foreign policy initiative since World War II from US lawmakers speaks volumes about how Obama and his colleagues assessed the public’s position on Iran generally and Obama’s nuclear talks with the mullocracy specifically.

The nuclear deal with Iran endangers the US directly.

It empowers the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism financially, diplomatically and militarily. Iran declared war against the US 37 years ago and has been calling for the destruction of America and supporting terrorist attacks against the US and its allies ever since.

As to those allies, the nuclear deal with Iran specifically, and the Obama administration’s decision to embrace Iran as a potential ally more generally, place Israel in jeopardy. So, too, it endangers all of the US’s traditional Arab allies.

Yet rather than reconsider its strategic goal of courting Iran at the expense of its own national security and that of its closest allies, the Obama administration determined that its most urgent goal was to scuttle Israeli attempts to warn lawmakers and the US public about the dangers of the deal. Rather than redouble its commitment to preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, the Obama administration launched an intensive espionage operation against Israel, its American- Jewish supporters and US lawmakers to diminish their ability to prevent the deal from being concluded or implemented.

The timing of the report is odd. Obama blocked Congress from even voting on his nuclear deal four months ago, and ever since he has been choking on his victory. With each passing day it becomes clearer that Netanyahu was right about the danger of the deal and Obama was wrong, and deliberately misleading.

Four months later, Iran still refuses to approve or implement the deal. The American hostages it holds continue to languish in its prisons. Its nuclear sites remain closed to international inspectors. Its ballistic missile program is moving forward and no one takes seriously the administration’s announcement this week that it will pursue sanctions at the UN Security Council against Iran for its recent ballistic missile tests.

For its part, Iran is so emboldened by the deal that last week it shot a missile across the Straits of Hormuz in close proximity to a US naval ship. The ayatollahs are convinced that Obama will suffer any and all indignities to keep up the fiction that he has a nuclear deal with them. They are certain that rather than acknowledge his mistake, Obama will ground Congress and Israel to the ground.

And yet now, as Iran daily humiliates Obama with its unbridled aggression, that senior administration officials chose to brag to Wall Street Journal reporters about how they spied on Israel in breach of Obama’s pledge not to spy on leaders of US allied nations. It is now, when Obama’s opening to Iran is a self-evident failure, that they chose to share how they broke US law by spying on US citizens and abused the president’s constitutional authority by spying on US lawmakers.

Hours after the Journal article was published, Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, announced that his committee will review how the NSA handled its intercepts of congressional communications with Israeli officials.

Certainly, the Intelligence Committee should aggressively pursue the issue. For the fact is that the administration’s arguably unconstitutional moves to block Congress from exercising oversight over Obama’s foreign policy is not limited to his nuclear outreach to Iran.

Last month, Secretary of State John Kerry said the climate change deal the US and the world powers concluded in Paris was drafted in a way that would deny Congress oversight power over the deal. In other words, a common thread linking the administration’s policies from the Middle East to the ozone layer is its desire to disempower Congress.

Israelis reasonably concentrate their attention on how stories affect them. So most of the discussion in Israel following the Journal’s report on Wednesday revolved around what the story means for the prospects of better relations with the administration in its final year in power.

But in truth, the story wasn’t really about Israel. It was about an administration so contemptuous of US lawmakers and citizens that its senior officials have no compunction about admitting that they are breaking the law. They brazenly admit that they are undertaking unlawful spying operations against private citizens and lawmakers and in so doing conducting a massive abuse of presidential powers while trampling the spirit and arguably the letter of the US Constitution.

And they expect that no one will call them to task for it.

www.CarolineGlick.com